


The Middle of The End

by nanye_i_arato_angaina



Series: Lady!Cas [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, I'm going to assume you know what that warning means, this is an endverse related fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 17:27:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nanye_i_arato_angaina/pseuds/nanye_i_arato_angaina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts with Sam saying yes, and it gets worse from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Middle of The End

Sam said yes.

Dean didn’t see him again for five years.

Dean said yes.

Nothing happened.

Dean shouted himself hoarse, and still nothing happened.

Hours and a bottle of Jack later, his phone rang, and the only reason he’d answered was he’d accidentally given Cass the same ringtone as Sam, and never bothered to change it.

He didn’t hang up when he realized his mistake, though, because even in his current state he could tell that Cass was not okay.

“Dean,” was all she said, and her usually soft voice was as choked and raw as his own throat felt. “They’ve gone. The angels. They’ve all gone.”

Dean didn’t think it could possibly get worse.

-

It did.

Dean all but ordered Cass to his motel room, but he hadn’t expected her to swoon upon arrival and keel over forward. He barely managed to catch her before she hit something, and used the arm that wasn’t supporting her to sweep leftover summoning ingredients from the bed to the floor. Her unconscious body gave away nothing of the angelic as he lifted it to the bed; Dean wondered if it was because she was wearing a vessel, or because the angels had left.

He called Michael more quietly while she was unconscious.

Cass was unconscious for two days.

Dean spit toothpaste into the sink – years of ingrained habit didn’t care that the only thing that had passed his lips had been 80 proof whiskey – when something behind him moved. He turned, hand going automatically to the gun at his waist. Cass was sitting up on the bed, looking wrinkled, exhausted, and devastated.

Neither of them said much. Dean suggested Bobby’s, and was glad when she didn’t protest, because he didn’t have any other ideas. In the short time it took him to gather the things he’d flung around the room, Cass barely so much as breathed.

He didn’t recognize the city he walked out into.

He’d stayed behind longer than he knew was safe, hoping that Michael would be more likely to respond.

All it did was delay them long enough to get trapped by croats and then have to get through them before making their way to Bobby’s.

Dean called Bobby from the road a day later. Nobody answered. Dean drove faster.

-

That was the first time Cass got drunk.

First they gave Bobby the hunter’s funeral that he deserved.

Then they went through Bobby’s house and found his entire stash. Cass had an eye for hiding places he’d never thought of.

Dean was still too drunk when he woke up to be surprised that he hadn’t died of alcohol poisoning. Cass was still sitting at the table, looking like she was trying to smite the last of the booze with her eyes alone.

It took a minute for his brain to get into gear enough to realize that she should have been able to.

They didn’t speak for hours; there was nothing to say. There was no plan, no goal, no angels, no Bobby, no Sam, no way to gank the devil riding him around, no response from Michael. There was only Dean and Cass and Bobby’s booze.

-

Eventually Dean remembered the Colt. But it wasn’t until after they’d run out of alcohol.

They raided Bobby’s house again, this time for weapons and books and anything else that either of them thought would be useful against the slowly but surely increasing number of croats that were starting to show up in more places. Once the Impala was loaded, Dean pulled out of the driveway without looking back once.

They holed up in a secluded cabin three states away, and there Dean taught Cass to be a hunter.

When her mojo drained completely, he dug the clothes Jordan had bought and another bag of his own clothes from the trunk. Cass had to roll his sweatpants at the waist and the ankles to be able to move easily in them, but once she’d gotten past that obstacle, she adjusted her grip on the machete she was holding, and feinted at Dean again.

When they mock fought, testing what angelic abilities had remained when she’d become human, Cass was ferocious when she was sober. She took to firearms quickly, and retained thousands of years of experience with blades. It was when Cass was drunk that she got almost scary. She never hurt him, not even accidentally, but any sense of self defense went out the window and she went completely on the offensive.

The first time they ran into croats on a supply run, Dean was sure that she was trying to get infected without straight-up standing still while they chewed on her, but he waited until they’d gotten back to the cabin to yell at her for it.

“Dammit, Cass! What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“I was thinking that I am still faster than you, and that while my true form was approximately the size of your Chrysler Building, I am, physically, significantly smaller than you are and therefore am less likely to get infected.”

“Right, because being smaller and faster makes a difference when you charge right at the damn things barehanded! Never mind the fact that it would have taken all of a second of a half for me to give you my second knife-”

“Do you really think that I’d be so selfish as to intentionally get myself killed and leave you alone? I fought my way through Hell, watched my brothers and sisters die, for forty years, just to raise your sorry ass from perdition! Croats hardly compare to those myriad denizens, and forgive me for trying to keep the one person I still have alive to love.”

Dean shut her up then, to keep her from talking about feelings, with a furious kiss, so different from the gentle one he’d given her, months ago now, before they’d faced Raphael together. Once she’d figured out what she was doing, she pushed back and gave as good as she got.

That was the first night they slept together.

-

The first time her hair got loose during one of their sparring sessions and Dean used it against her was when Cass called hold and took her knife to it. She gathered it all in one hand before putting the flat of her blade against the back of her neck and slicing up before releasing long brown strands that had seen better days to drift away in the breeze.

A family of mockingbirds with very soft nests was the happiest about this.

-

Dean eventually decided that Cass was used to fighting as a human.

He wasn’t sure he believed her spiel about not being suicidal, but he couldn’t come up with any other reasons to stall them at the cabin.

“How’s Jordan?” he asked as they drove away for the last time.

“Gone. The moment I no longer possessed the grace to keep her separate from me was the moment her soul was shunted from her own body directly to heaven. I believe she will be happier there.”

Dean wasn’t sure what to say to that.

The ride was silent for miles.

-

The next time they slept together was after a lead on the Colt came to a dead end after they’d been following it for weeks. They got shitfaced, and ended up in a sweaty tangle of sheets.

When Dean woke in the morning, Cass was curled into him, limbs tucked in tight, save the arm that was extended just enough for her right hand to grip his left shoulder like a lifeline. He slipped out of the bed and replaced the covers over her, sweeping the hair from her face impulsively.

He didn’t hear the soft whimpers she started making after he left the room.

They woke her, and she was alone.

-

The bridge looked familiar, but Dean didn’t place it until they passed a hotel with most of the neon sign unlit.

“Chuck!” he exclaimed when it came to him.

“Chuck,” Cass agreed softly, and helped him find the place she’d died for him.

They didn’t find the scruffy looking prophet, but there was a series of numbers carved drunkenly into one of the doors, and it didn’t take Dean long to decide it was probably a phone number.

They met Chuck at an out-of-the-way place that had once been a summer camp.

-

It was easier, hiding up at Camp Chitaqua, than dealing with the quarantines and the restrictions and the mess that the governments made of the world. Kill bad things, get supplies, look for the Colt.

Cass got used sounds that she’d only previously heard through angelic senses when she’d stormed hell to raise Dean, and it was Dean again who was making the demons sound like that.

She was very, very careful drawing devil’s traps.

-

Time passed remarkably quickly when you spent most of it drunk, hungover, or on the adrenaline high that came from fighting for your life, Cass learned when it had been a whole year since everything had started. A year since Sam said yes and Michael said no and the angels fucked off to God-knows-where. She also learned that she didn’t particularly care that she’d picked up bad habits from Dean.

Alcohol was good for this not-caring lark, and besides, sometimes Dean grinned at her a little when she was particularly blasphemous.

-

The only time Cass stopped drinking for multiple days in a row was the six months after she discovered she was pregnant. She knew that there were few situations that would have been worse to bring a child into, but she couldn’t help but be glad that, after all the lives she’d ended, she’d started one. She and Dean, anyway, and she’d never seen him go as pale as he had when she’d told him.

The same conflicting emotions she’d felt chased each other across his face, and then he got drunk. But later, he crawled into bed next to her, held her gently but close, and told her that she’d better learn how to be mother quicker than she learned how to be human, because he would be terrible at mothering. She swatted him with the back of her hand and told him that Sam grew up just fine.

-

Cass and Dean Winchester had a daughter for all of twenty minutes. Mary Grace was born two months early into a world where every birth was high risk. Cass was drugged and unconscious the entire time her daughter was alive. Dean held an unhealthily quiet, impossibly tiny baby while what medical staff they had tried to save her mother.

It wasn’t the first funeral they’d had at Camp Chitaqua, but it certainly had the smallest casket.

Cass refused the wheelchair, but fell on the few stairs outside. Dean had her in his arms before she could do more than grab in the direction of the railing, and carried her the rest of the way, cradling her as close and as gently as he had their baby.

They sat together by the smallest grave Dean have ever dug, and that was the first time Dean ever saw Cass really cry. He held her close, and his tears dripped into her hair.

-

Dean had said, so long ago, that when humans wanted something really, really badly, they lied, so in actuality it was his fault that she milked her broken foot longer than she needed to; she liked the drugs. They were like alcohol, but faster. And different.

It was nice, not caring.

Cass didn’t care that all the angels were gone, because it had been years, and they were all dicks, anyway.

She didn’t care that her bed was cold sometimes, because sometimes Dean was there.

She didn’t care that she’d started looking for the drugs first and the food second when they went out on supply runs and looking for the Colt, because eating was more effort than it was worth, and this haze was worth every lecture she was given about the dangers of overdosing.

She only almost overdosed once, on accident, but Dean was there to save her, so what did it matter?

She took to reciting the Bible to herself, though it was the familiarity of the words rather than the words themselves that comforted her.

She didn’t really need it, but one time while Dean was out without her, she snuck his blue jacket from where it had been stashed after something with talons had slashed two long holes down the back of it. She borrowed a needle and thread, and set to teaching herself how to sew fabric instead of gaping wounds. It wasn’t until she was finished and examining her back in the mirror that she realized the two ropey scar-like lines of stitches were almost exactly where the physical manifestations of her wings would have gone through the fabric if she’d still had them, and ended up laughing hysterically and curled up in a ball on the floor, tears streaming down her face.

Chuck had been the one who’d hugged her tightly and then put her to bed, because Dean wasn’t there.

If Dean recognized the jacket with sleeves rolled four times that she wore on excursions from camp, he never said anything about it to her.

-

When Dean walked into her room wearing the same jacket she had folded among her own clothes but newer and hole-free, she knew something was up. She looked up at him from where she sat on the floor- not that she could ever look up at him- and tried to figure out what was different about him.

“You are not you. Not now-you, anyway,” she decided. He was like the jacket: less worn and no horrible patch job done by someone who didn’t know what she was doing. She held up a hand to him out of a habit that this Dean wasn’t used to, but he pulled her to her feet anyway. She continued to study him as he said he was from 2009 and that it was in fact Zachariah’s fault, the dick.

She didn’t realize she was fiddling with his amulet until Dean’s gaze focused on it, but she had to drop it to giggle into her hands when he asked her to fly him back.

“Life,” she replied with a shrug when he asked her what had happened to her.

She, Risa, two Deans, and a Colt gathered around a map. Past Dean seemed to be trying to stay as far away from his present self as possible, which she totally understood, but she sat cross-legged next to her Dean anyway.

He wasn’t really her anything, but she could pretend, in the privacy of her own head.

She laughed when past Dean had to explain about an encounter with the various other women he’d been sleeping with, and it didn’t sound right even to her, and she didn’t even care.

“Our fearless leader, I’m afraid, is all too well schooled in the art of getting to the truth,” Cass explained when Past Dean questioned his future self about the veracity of his information.

“Torture? Oh, so we’re torturing again? Oh, that’s good. Classy,” Dean said sarcastically. Cass giggled again. Maybe that Dean still enough of himself left that this whole mess could be avoided.

“What? I like past you,” she retorted.

“Lucifer is here, now. I know the block, and I know the building.” Her Dean pointed at a red circle he’d drawn on the map. Cass rested her chin on his elbow as she looked over his arm.

“Oh, good. It’s right in the middle of a hot zone.”

“Crawling with croats, yeah. Are you saying my plan is reckless?” he asked, turning his head to look at her.

“Are you suggesting we walk straight up the driveway, past the demons and the croats and we shoot the devil?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, if you don’t like ‘reckless’, I could use ‘insouciant’, maybe.”

“Are you coming?”

Cass had followed Dean anywhere he’d given her enough warning to follow him, and this time was no different.

-

“They’ll never see us coming,” her Dean assured the others. “Trust me. Now, weapons check. We’re on the move in five.”

“Hey, uh, me. Can I talk to you for a sec?” past Dean requested. He probably knew what was about to happen just as well as she did. Cass was pretty sure that none of the others caught on, though, so it was okay.

How many people could say that they’d died twice to give Dean the time to try and stop the devil?

When her Dean stood to talk to his past self as requested, Cass stood with him, and before he could walk away, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. He kissed her back, harder.

“For luck,” she said, when they pulled apart. What she really meant was goodbye. And possibly I love you, if she was actually still capable of that. She wasn’t sure.

She ran in front of her Dean when he moved to past Dean, and kissed him, too. It was different- he was gentler, more cautious, and it almost broke her heart. She mustered up a smile for him that wasn’t sarcastic, and meant it when she wished him good luck.

Good luck killing the devil was what it sounded like.

Good luck preventing this from ever happening was what she meant. If anyone could do it, it was this unbroken Dean, who knew what would happen if he didn’t.

She held her head high for the first time in too long as she marched to her death.


End file.
